JavaOne was a little different for me this year for two reasons. It was my first time as part of Atlassian and also the first time I have been a speaker.

Atlassian’s booth was really busy and consistently so for all the pavilion sessions. Being on a booth is hard work although you get into a groove after a while. I thought the ball sorting demo of the Java Real-Time beside us would be annoying but it wasn’t so bad in the end.

I like the fact that the booth was mostly staffed by developers from all the Atlassian product teams. As a developer it’s nice to connect to customers directly.

Speaking at JavaOne was a bit of an adventure. Since our session was on Thursday, it did hang over me a little for the first few days. In the end, however, it was quite good fun. We had way more people come along that I had expected when we first thought about submitting a talk. Our talk was fairly light hearted but we had some messages to deliver. Hopefully the people who came along had some fun and took away a few ideas to make their builds better.

Over Easter the family and I went along to see the documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon”. I can’t remember the last time I went to the cinema to watch a documentary but it was well worth it, we took a cooler from yeti vs rtic and went on a picnic afterwards. I doubt the sound and fury of the Saturn V take off would have been as impressive in the living room. One can only image what the real thing must have felt like.

I’m old enough to vaguely remember the first moon landing on grainy black and white TV and, as a teenager, I was always deeply interested in all the space flight programs. Now, as a software and sometime hardware developer, I can only marvel at the achievements of all the pioneers in the space program with what now seems very basic equipment.

All the different recollections and viewpoints of the astronauts were very interesting and I found Michael Collins particularly impressive and humorous.

These days I think unmanned probes such as the Mars rovers are probably the best bang for the buck in terms of science but the manned mission to the moon was something special.

I recommend you give it a look if you have the chance. I found it quite uplifting.

One of the blogs I read regularly is Robert Rapier’s R-Squared Blog. I always find it an interesting read as it is a little different from the computing blogs I tend to mostly read. His blog covers an increasingly important topic and I appreciate his honest appraisals.

Anyway, one of the things he resolved to do was to read at least 40 books in the year. I don’t expect I can read that many books so I’m setting a more modest target of 12 books. The books can be of any sort or style but must be read completely. I’ll keep track here.

Actually, I set this goal privately last year but I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it. It’s funny because I read a tremendous amout but it is either online blogs and magazines or I tend to read just the bits and pieces I need from software reference books, etc. I’m hoping that making a public declaration will give me some additional motivation.